With all the news around Chelsea and the sanctions against owner Roman Abramovich, ESPN+ writer Ryan O'Hanlon looks at the knock-on effect to the on-field element: how will their team shape up given the limitations placed against them?
They called it the "£20 million game," but ultimately, it was worth a lot more than that. With one match left in the 2002-03 season, Chelsea and Liverpool were tied in fourth place on 64 points. Somehow, their one remaining game was against each other in west London. Win and you're in the Champions League. Lose and you miss out on the millions that come with qualification.
Chelsea, quite literally, could not afford to lose. Under owner Ken Bates, the club was on the verge of bankruptcy; in fact, things were so bad that the night before the match, it wasn't manager Claudio Ranieri who gave the pep talk. No, first it was Trevor Birch, the Ernst & Young accountant-turned-Chelsea chief executive, who told the team "in no uncertain terms that this would be one of the most significant matches of their lives," as John Clegg and Joshua Robinson write in "The Club," their history of the Premier League. Then came Charles Chandler Krulak, a four-star American general who served in World War II and the wars in Korea and Vietnam.
Just in case the message wasn't clear before kickoff, Birch swung by the locker room to, as Clegg and Robinson put it, "remind [the team] of how critical this match was to all of their professional prospects."
Although they went down in the 10th minute to a Sami Hyypia header, Chelsea scored twice in the next 20 minutes to win the match 2-1, creating the possibility for everything that happened next. A couple of months later, the club was sold to a secretive Russian oligarch named Roman Abramovich for £140 million.
Worth around $8 billion, Abramovich had been sniffing around the Premier League for a while. He considered Arsenal, but was (mistakenly) told by Union Bank of Switzerland that the club was not for sale. He looked at Tottenham, too, but he didn't like the neighborhood in which that the club's old stadium, White Hart Lane, was located. He wasn't in love with Chelsea either, but if they'd qualified for the Champions League, it'd be good enough for him. They did, and here we are: Chelsea have won two Champions League titles and five Premier League trophies since 2003 ... and Abramovich has been banned by the Premier League and had his assets frozen by the British government.
Chelsea are for sale and currently, Chelsea cannot make profits, can't sell tickets, can't sign new players, can't re-sign current players, and they can't spend more than a predetermined allotment of money to travel to away matches.
The ripple effects of Russia's invasion of Ukraine are going to stretch across the globe, too -- most of them nothing compared to the destruction in the Ukraine. One of those second-order effects: Chelsea Football Club is never going to be the same.
What might the future of the club look like? And what happens when a team is no longer the personal plaything of a multibillionaire?